


Written

by Ankaret



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-13
Updated: 2009-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-04 09:38:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Someone</i> came out of the Chamber of Secrets.  This is her story.  AU, diverging during CoS.  Warning for self-harm references, mental illness and general darkness of theme.  All characters belong to J.K Rowling.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Written

**Author's Note:**

> Written after HBP and before DH.

"You haven't written in your journal," said the mediwizard. His tone was as carefully blank as the scrubbed-clean walls. He'd had training, of course. Muggles may shriek and shiver about our lack of medical technology and hygiene (and they have a point there; some of the gnarled old fingernails preparing potions over in the other wing could, frankly, stand a good scrubbing) but we had the talking cure long before they did. I think it's because more of us go mad, and we do it in such flamboyant ways.

"I haven't written in my journal," I agreed.

"Are you still experiencing the anxiety about writing?" he enquired. Again, there was no possible overtone of _a piece of chocolate should have sorted you out months ago_; but I felt the chill of it in the air anyway.

"I suppose you could call it an experience," I agreed again, this time sounding positively jovial.

He looked at me over his spectacles. "Suppose you tell me what you might have written in your journal entry, if you had made one today."

I tried to organise my thoughts. What had happened that would be worth recording? The tea trolley this morning was out of butterscotch horns and Mr Snockmorton, who always likes to make an orchestra with his food, had a screaming tantrum. Two boxes of Honeydukes' Best chocolates came with the owl post - one from the Prewett cousins and one from someone called Michael Corner who to be honest I barely remember - and a box of French cream cakes from Fleur.

I don't know why the sudden onslaught of food; I can only suppose that Mum's too embarassed to tell anyone what's happened and has come up with the cover story that I'm anorexic. I don't really blame her, to tell you the truth. She had a cuckoo in her nest for six years and she never suspected. And it wasn't Percy. One Ginny Weasley was carried into the Chamber of Secrets and another was carried out again. And for six years, no one suspected a thing.

Eventually, Harry Potter worked it out - he's a hero, of course, but one can't call him quick on the uptake - and, to cut a long story short, I'm the survivor. You can imagine how that makes me feel.

"I got a letter," I said finally. "Luna Lovegood's coming to visit. Neville's bringing her."

"And how does that make you feel?"

They always ask how things make you feel. "Weird," I said at last. "I mean, I think she was quite good friends with... _her_. The other one."

"So was Mr Longbottom. How do you feel about his visits?"

The nurses all think it's a romance. It isn't. It's just that... well, even from the first, I didn't mind seeing Neville. He's in and out of here a lot anyway, what with the work that still needs doing on his arm after it was injured during the final battle of the War, and visiting his parents. He still has parents plural, though his mother caught pneumonia last winter when the roof blew off during all the fighting, and they weren't sure whether she'd make it. He told me about that. The nurse came in half-way through and tried to shut him up, but actually I didn't mind hearing how she bundled up all her blankets with a big smile just when they thought she was getting better, and soaked them in the sink; or how very weary he was of people telling him in hushed voices that it _might all be for the best_ if she died.

I know how pernicious that line of thought is. I could feel people thinking it at me, even from the other side of the hospital, when the other one was dying. I wish they'd let me in to see her, though I can understand why they wouldn't. She was _me_. She had all the flair and the dash and the time in the uncomplicated sun. She had so many things _first_.

But I survived her.

It occurred to me that if I didn't answer they might stop Neville coming to see me. "I - like seeing him?" I hazarded. It seemed to be the right answer, in as much as anyone could tell. The mediwizard in front of me, with his bland large golden spectacles and his bland brushed-back long hair, was a cold-reader's worst nightmare.

Well, not precisely _worst_ nightmare, all things considered.

"Let's go back to how you felt whilst you were in the Chamber of Secrets," he said. I was grateful for his bluntness. There had been too much skipping around the dangerous footing at the edge of that memory already.

I frowned. "I'm not certain I _was_ in the Chamber. Not wholly, I mean. I felt as if I could see the whole castle. I could float through walls. I could hear conversations, but it was like hearing voices in a dream - they boomed and echoed and didn't make much sense. No one could see me. I floated straight through Peeves once. I followed Percy around - I tried to talk to him - but I couldn't make him hear me."

"You recognised Percy?" he asked neutrally.

"I was under the direct influence of the Dark Lord. I wasn't _stupid_," I said scornfully.

He smiled. Pleased, I thought, at having wrestled an emotion out of me. "Can you carry on?" he asked, as if he thought I was going to sob. I don't cry. I never have. You wouldn't have seen Fred or George crying. You wouldn't believe how much I've wanted to talk to Fred and George. They've _always_ had another self, one each; and it's not as if either of them are the sort of models of huggy, laid-back non-competitiveness who would placidly accept always having to share. I'm staggered it didn't all turn toxic between them. Perhaps it did, but it was all resolved in the blurry non-time before my first memories.

They haven't come to see me, of course. None of the family have. I suppose I can't blame them. The War did worse than infecting Neville's broken arm with a particularly nasty hex that they're still trying to unravel, and blowing off the St. Mungo's roof. Harry hasn't come either, though I heard he was at the other one's deathbed. I felt a bit angry about that, to be honest; he was _mine_, not hers. I suppose it was _like_ the Boy Who Lived, to go and see even that pitiful frail remnant of the Dark Lord's schemes. And like Neville, to visit me.

"And how did you feel after you left the Chamber?" the mediwizard asked me.

"Numb. Wobbly-legged. Places I _remembered_ were strange to me. New."

"There was substantial transferral of memory through the diary," he said.

"I know that."

"When were you aware the substitution had been made?"

That was a new one. "I'm Ginny Weasley," I said sulkily. "I've been in front of a _tribunal_ to prove that. I offered to have Muggle blood tests - "

"They would have been inconclusive."

"And come up with toxic levels of ink and You-Know-Who in my bloodstream. I _know_. It makes me feel like one of those characters in a frightful postmodern novel who starts talking back to their creator."

"I know you're clever," he said, unruffled. "I know you have a way with words, too. Why don't you want to answer the question? What is it that you don't want to talk about?"

I looked at the clock above him. A busy cuckoo on a sort of swing-seat was doing some painting and decorating of its fretwork Swiss-chalet house; it stared at me with painted disapproving eyes and tapped the wooden wall next to the clock-face. Twenty minutes more. I could stall him. I'd stalled him before. I'd stalled the mediwizard before him and the one before her.

"You know when the substitution was made," I said in a hostile voice. "One Ginny Weasley went into the Chamber of Secrets. A different one came out. A simulacrum, brought out of the book in the same way that the Dark Lord's spirit was put into it. A _thing_ with a bit of a soul, pale as ectoplasm and staggering on its feet, only living because two souls can't share a Horcrux. Though actually, Hermione once told me the catalogue of the Muggle Duc de Berry's treasures contained a book of hours that had belonged to the twin Dark witches Bellina and Bellona Black..."

"I already said that I know you're clever," he said in that aggravatingly calm voice again. "When did you suspect?"

"When it took Harry so long to rescue me." I wouldn't blow my nose on the box of tissues provided. I wouldn't clench my hands in the lap of my nightgown. I wouldn't throw the chair at him and try to escape out of the window. I had tried that before, several times, with variations including attempting to kill him with the sharp insides of the cuckoo-clock, and none of them had worked.

"How do you feel about Harry Potter?" he asked maddeningly.

"The same way _she_ felt, of course."

"The nurses say you've been writing on your skin again."

"The nurses should mind their own business. I'm more real than she ever was. _Everything's possible if you've got enough nerve_ \- that was me! Playing on the Quidditch team was me!" I rose from the chair and started towards him. I wanted to see him cringe. He didn't. He was good. "I fought at the Department of Mysteries. And when the Dark Lord whispered in my head..." I was close enough to see the pores in his skin. He hadn't risen from his chair. Oh, he _was_ good. I leaned down and stared down past his glasses. His eyes looked vulnerable behind them. My hair fell in untidy hanks against my throat. It looked greasy and lank; they wouldn't let me have my wand, and I'd never really got the hang of messing about with soapwort and vinegar.

"... when he talked to me in my sleep, every night for six years," I said softly, "I didn't listen to him. And I didn't tell anyone."

"Why didn't you tell anyone?" he asked calmly.

I realised with a flood of embarrassment that my bosom was dangling in his face. That's the trouble with a place like this; if you're surrounded by mad people for long enough, you start losing touch with the social niceties. I took a step backwards. "What would the point have been?"

"Did you tell anyone about things, when you were growing up?"

"I didn't grow up."

"You have Ginevra Weasley's memories of growing up."

"Are you poking around again to see whether the twins beat me with Quidditch brooms or Ron made me eat my own Puffskein? Nothing like that happened. It was just the usual rough and tumble of growing up in a big, happy family. We all loved each other, and we all knew that Weasleys aren't whiners." A small smile curled at my mouth. "Well, maybe Ron."

"How do you feel about the other Ginny?"

"She's dead. What am I supposed to feel about her?"

"I've had a letter from the Ministry," he said.

That was new. I sat down on his desk and swung my legs, and looked at him alertly. I could see myself reflected in his spectacles. I looked like some kind of madwoman.

He cleared his throat. "They feel that - considering all the damage done by the War and its aftermath - that nothing would be gained by - "

"Telling the world that the _real_ Ginny Weasley only came to light when the Boy Who Lived's search for the sixth Horcrux meant the Chamber of Secrets had to be opened again?" I suggested politely, and in the style of the Daily Prophet. "I was _drowning_ and he just walked over to her instead! He didn't want the woman who stood up to him and told him when he was being a self-pitying idiot. He didn't want the woman he..." I caught up with myself and pressed my lips tightly together. There were reasons I wrote on my skin. My idiot body remembered, even when I didn't want it to. Especially when I didn't want it to.

"He wanted," I finished tightly, "the girl on the pedestal. The blanched frail thing lying there like the prize at the end of the story. If he couldn't have a princess in a tower to rescue, he'd have a virgin under the ice. And it wasn't even as if she looked all that special. All right, so she hadn't had a haircut in six years, but she hadn't cut her toenails either."

"They feel it's time to draw a line under this unfortunate period in our history."

I drew on the back of my hand with my fingernail. Not very much; only enough to make the skin turn white, not red. They kept my fingernails cut short. "If anyone chooses where the lines are drawn," I said, "it will be me."

He looked up at the clock. "We don't have long. I wanted to talk to you about this. They feel that - as a heroine of the War - "

I smiled at him and continued writing on my skin. The big swoop of the G, the downward curve of the Y. All the heroism was mine. _She_ had no part of it. She had done nothing, learnt nothing, achieved nothing since she was eleven. But she was _the real one_ still. The people who knew kept my secret. I supposed the Ministry had put pressure on them. But they didn't visit me. No one visited but Neville.

"They feel you should make public appearances. Perhaps give an interview to the Prophet. I understand Mr Potter is willing..."

"Do you really want the Wizarding Press to see that he can hardly bear to be in the same room as me?"

"Not everyone has your remarkable gift for reading a situation, Miss Weasley."

"They're _reporters_. They'll sniff out that something's wrong."

He didn't say that I'd managed to fool them for six years. He didn't have to. I thought about the Ministry and their offer. Thank God for bureaucracy; they hadn't managed to get the legal apparatus in gear to produce me at a show trial before she died, and now they only had one Ginny Weasley left and didn't want to waste her. So here I was, the Girl Who Lived. I hadn't managed to marry into the Who Lived franchise - and in retrospect, I felt a small crawling thankfulness for that - but it seemed I'd got in by the back door anyway. I wanted to laugh at it all.

"I want you to carry on coming back for observation," he said.

I looked at his notes. The temptation to say _what's high-functioning sociopath_ in a little-girl voice and suck my finger was very nearly irresistible.

"I don't want to talk to reporters," I said finally. "I don't want to go to the Ministry, either. The last time I was there, I broke my ankle."

That time _he_ nearly laughed. I felt pleased with myself. The cuckoo coughed. The hour was up.

"What do you want to do?" he asked. I wasn't sure whether it was the last question of the session, or whether he was asking on his own time.

I stretched my arms back over my head and rocked. Out of the window, the sun was rising over Muggle London. "I want to see Neville and Luna," I said at last. "And after that - we'll see."

_You'll all see_, I thought. And just to make sure I wouldn't forget it, I wrote it with my fingernail on my skin.


End file.
